Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [168]
Pacific Palisades: 1952–1958
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After two weeks in the capital of honky-tonk, the couple had had enough.49
“We couldn’t wait to get back to the Palisades and that tiny queen who had taken us over,” said Ronnie, referring to one-and-a-half-year-old Patti.50
“We had been very, very definite as to the kind of person we wanted. Good moral character, intelligent. Not the kind with the reputation for the social ramble. A good upright kind of person.” So said Earl B. Dunckel, a General Electric public relations executive, explaining why the giant industrial corporation agreed to have Reagan take over as host of the struggling weekly drama series it had been sponsoring since early 1953. General Electric Theater was originally conceived by MCA, in collaboration with G.E.’s advertising agency, Batten, Barton, Durstine and Osborne (known as BBD&O), as a way to lure big-name movie stars—most of whom were still refusing to do TV—onto the small screen. Dunckel recalled meeting Reagan at an early planning session in New York in August 1954: “There was nothing of the posturing, nothing of the ‘I am a star’—he was a regular guy . . . whom I liked instantly. . . . Nancy was there with him.”51
Reagan had vowed he would never do a TV series, but the terms of the contract he was offered by Taft Schreiber, the MCA vice president who ran Revue Productions, which produced the show, were extremely attractive.
For an annual salary starting at $125,000, he would introduce each week’s half-hour episode, star in some, and tour the country for sixteen weeks visiting G.E. plants and making speeches as part of the company’s Employee and Community Relations Program. This last function, Reagan would later say, was the clincher for him. In addition, he was given the title of program supervisor as well as profit participation in episodes he starred in after they had run five times. The contract was for five years.52 As it worked out, the G.E. job not only rescued him professionally and financially but also laid the groundwork for his emergence as a national political figure.
The revised General Electric Theater, hosted by Ronald Reagan, was a hit from its first airing on CBS at nine o’clock on Sunday evening, September 26, 1954, and by its third year only I Love Lucy and The Ed Sullivan Show had higher ratings. Nancy co-starred with Ronnie in the first season’s third episode, “The Long Way Round,” which was billed as “the tense story of a wife’s attempts to help her husband recover from a breakdown,” and she would appear in a handful of others over the years. Some episodes were broadcast live from New York, and some were filmed on the old Republic Pictures lot, where Revue had set up shop. Reagan’s introduction of each 2 7 2
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House episode was less than two minutes long, and he signed off every show with the company motto: “Here at General Electric, progress is our most important product.”53
“Ronnie held it together. He was a wonderful host. We couldn’t have asked for anybody better,” said William Frye, who produced the filmed segments for Revue from 1955 to 1960. “There was a scriptwriter to write the intros, but Ronnie always contributed in his own way and always made them better. We had a TelePrompTer, but he very seldom used it—
Ronnie knew his lines. Our deal with Ronnie was that he would star in three out of every thirteen episodes. I usually had one being written, one being shot, and one being edited, to keep ahead. Once in a while Ronnie would come into the office and say, ‘Gee, I just read such and such a script.
Who’s going to do it?’ I’d say, ‘Well, I’m trying to get Charlton Heston,’
or, ‘I’m trying to get Fred MacMurray.’ Because those guys hadn’t done television at that point. And he would say, ‘Well, listen, I would like to do it.’ So it was kind of a touchy situation, because I wanted to keep Ronnie happy, but at the same time I was trying